Abstract
He was, everyone agreed, a great journalist. But what was he like to work with? Journalists who did, remember
‘The night JFK was assassinated, Harry was on his way to the Teesside Press Ball. He heard the news on his car radio and returned immediately to his office at the Northern Echo to create a special multi-page section. He needed file pictures, of course, but the librarian was on holiday and no one else knew how the filing system worked. Except for one other person – the librarian’s assistant, whom we journalists all knew as “Shirley File Room”. But she had left for the night. Reporters were despatched to her home and discovered she was at a local cinema. Undeterred, Harry persuaded the cinema manager to flash a message on the screen during the film saying: “Urgent. Will Shirley File Room return to the office immediately.” She did, found the Kennedy pictures and Harry completed his historic special pages.’
Don Berry
‘Leafing through Harry Evans’ chatty old notes to me that accompanied my rises in pay, I find scant mention of specific journalistic attainment. But there is plenty of evidence to indicate that our regular encounters on the squash court at the RAC club weighed heavily on the editor’s mind. Thus he writes on one occasion, “I appreciate the flair you bring to the Sunday Times, though, of course, it would advance your career even further if you could contrive to sprain both ankles.”
In another such missive, Harry wrote to me more flagrantly, “I have high expectations for the future; provided you are sensible enough to keep losing at squash I am sure you have a marvellous career.” What’s this about “keep losing?” I asked myself back then, and even now. Absolutely no doubt in my mind Harry Evans was one of the greatest editors of all time, but his short-term memory of losses at squash was lamentably poor.’
Lewis Chester
‘I was given the task of working up a news piece about the breakfast television franchises, with no little help from the likes of Hughie Green, presenter of the popular talent show Opportunity Knocks, on the phone. By Saturday afternoon, I had got only as far as some summaries of all the bids and hadn’t a clue how to start my piece with an original intro. I returned from fetching a sandwich to find a handwritten note from Harry on my desk in the newsroom, summoning me to his office with all the copious bid material, perilously close to edition time.
“Ever heard of J. Fred Muggs?” he asked me. I hadn’t. “The chimpanzee. He rescued breakfast TV in the States, back in the 50s.” Harry’s secretary Joan Thomas popped her head round his office door from time to time. “The stone room’s on again, Harry, where’s your copy?” By now it must have been 4.30. I followed him down to the stone room. The front page was already set up on the stone, minus Harry’s copy for the splash, with my by-line on it.
And so it was that Sunday Times readers were introduced to NBC’s saviour, with more than a hint that breakfast viewers in the UK would also take kindly to such a character performing over their cornflakes. Muggs appeared in the front of the splash. I still have a copy of the original, hand-sketched layout for the front page and beyond, dashed off by Harry to the amusement and gratitude of an impressionable young news reporter on the other side of his desk. How prescient was Harry’s approach to the story: TV-am launched unsuccessfully and Roland Rat was brought in to help save the station from ruin. With his arrival, viewers soared from just 100,000 to nearly two million.’
John Coates
‘Harry was known for sometimes lunching with two people, but not at the same time. He would have one course with one and be chauffeured to the second, where he would have a main course. On at least one occasion, two members of staff, after seeing him separately, left his office each claiming to have been offered the same job, that of film critic.
When it was difficult to get to see him, male journalists were able to exploit a gender advantage by waiting until he went for a pee and then join him at a neighbouring stall for a quick decision.’
Alex Finer
‘“Where’s Harry?” was the cry that went up most days on the editorial floor at The Sunday Times. Harold Evans was quite often a blur. A small, mercurial figure, he moved so fast and unpredictably between the editorial floors and the print room that it was impossible to locate him with any certainty. Sightings were passed from reporter to reporter in the event that someone needed to know. He boasted that his door was always open, but he was not always behind it.
When I arrived in 1974, I thought the stories that he had to be cornered in the gents for a signature on a cash advance or to clinch a decision must be apocryphal. Evidently not. There were occasions when I had to follow him into the lift, or even to his motorbike, while he issued a blizzard of instructions about an assignment.
Tacked on to the end of the features subs’ desk, I had a worm’s eye view of his day-to-day involvement in every aspect of the newspaper. A passionate authority on typography and newspaper design, he would assist the design team with page layouts, choose photographs or bustle over to inspect our headlines. “Days of wine in Rosas,” he scribbled over my shoulder as I struggled to find the right headline for a travel piece. His handwriting, like everything else about Harry, was quick and not always decipherable.
My job at this time meant working in the composing room on a Friday and Saturday when pages were being made up in hot metal. Addicted to print and a self-confessed meddler, this was the place Harry, in his shirtsleeves and half-moon specs, loved to be, surrounded by the clatter of linotype machines and the smell of warm newsprint.
After the year-long shutdown of The Times and The Sunday Times, I moved from arts to news features. One Wednesday, Harry decided that a dispute over the rights of ramblers should be illustrated by putting me in a field with a bull to illustrate the risks they faced. I was photographed walking nervously past the untethered beast while the farmer trailed behind at a safe distance, out of camera. Health and safety measures consisted of a bucket of cattle nuts. The stunt was typical of his eye for presentation and his casual belief that if the story had merit, all would somehow be well.’
Elizabeth Grice
‘Harry, and you addressed him as such, was a “one of us” colleague who raced about the office in shirtsleeves and Mancunian vowels, re-writing headlines, subbing copy on the stone as page proofs (in those aah-so-ancient days) were pulled, making decisions before even the sharpest of his colleagues realised there was a problem. He was a dynamo, never not talked about, respected, loathed (by those he exposed) but not disliked as a chap. Harry was the undisputed leader simply because he was the best journalist in the house. He, more than anyone, turned The Sunday Times into what we were persuaded to believe was “one of the world’s great newspapers”.
Evans was a man of the political centre, but when he saw an injustice he set about with unrivalled persistence setting matters to rights. He launched the paper into crusades that would have horrified those who wrote for it a bare 10 years earlier – on race relations, penal reform, abortion law reform, and the ancient sore that was Ireland, not to mention the baby-deforming drug Thalidomide and the outing of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy. On a minor scale, I had first-hand experience of his style, having smuggled myself into the Birmingham abattoir to view rats scurrying about the floor. It was the Sunday before Christmas but he put it on page one: “Fridge rats attack market meat.”
Evans could do this because he, not his proprietor, was the final arbiter of what went in. Lord (Roy) Thomson had no political agenda, was no monomaniacal egotist. All he asked for was a handsome profit from his newspapers and television stations. I see Harry leading Roy, heavy double-breasted suit, into the newsroom at ten past six on a Saturday afternoon as a messenger hauls in the first edition pile and cuts the string. Insight have another big one, and Harry shows it to Roy – who squints briefly at the headline before proceeding to turn the pages, one by one, news section, business, sport, weekly review. He’s counting the advertising space. And he’s pleased.’
Denis Herbstein
‘In March 1981, I resigned as assistant editor of The Times within hours of Harold Evans quitting as editor. It was nine years to the day since he had hired me as a reporter on The Sunday Times. “Producing a newspaper is a serious business,” Harry had said to me that year, “but it should also be fun. Let me know when it stops being fun.” It often did. But we certainly had fun solving his problems with Times Newspapers’ managing director Gerald Long, who had been denying him a budget.
One day, Harry called me into his office to show me correspondence between Long and the chef Albert Roux about the quality of the French cheese at his Michelin-starred restaurant Le Gavroche. It was not up to scratch, complained Long in some detail, to which Roux predictably took exception. How had Harry got hold of these documents? “Long showing off. He gave me them to read, thinking I’d admire his knowledge of fromage as much as his exquisite prose style.”
“Very droll. But why are you making me read them?”
“Because you’re going to print them on Saturday’s Review front,” he said, with a mischievous grin. I was perplexed, to say the least; but his wish was naturally my command. That Saturday, Harry’s ploy worked like a charm. As Long took his weekly turn around the Sunday Times office with Rupert Murdoch, he was as horrified as his boss to find the staff heaving with laughter over his protests about London’s finest cheeseboard. Long was swiftly moved from The Times to some sinecure at News International.’
Anthony Holden
‘In the nicest way, there was something of Lord Northcliffe in Harry Evans. Neither man was ever short of ideas. “Why are there so many people wearing silk hats in Hampstead this morning?” the founder and owner of the Daily Mail asked his news editor one day in 1919. “Send a reporter to find out why.” The answer was easily discovered – it was the Jewish New Year – but Northcliffe still thought it a good story if it were, in his words, “properly handled”. “It ought to be headed ‘MANY TALL HATS AT HAMPSTEAD’. It’s no good heading it ‘JEWISH NEW YEAR’. People will be captured by the heading about the hats.”
Harry’s instincts for a story often ran along similar lines. On a summer’s day in 1976, I was editing what would later be called the lifestyle pages when the phone rang. It was Harry. “I’m in a call-box in Trafalgar Square and it’s boiling outside,” he said. Somehow my pages, which at that moment were progressing dully but efficiently towards their deadline, needed to reflect Harry’s discovery of the heat. I did my best. Every page was gutted and transformed. PHEW! How to dress, where to go, what to drink, what to eat…
It was fun, Harry was pleased, and I was pleased that he was pleased. Not every suggestion worked so well, and some were better ignored. There was a vogue around that time for converting wine bottles into water glasses: using a special implement, you cut off the bottle’s bottom third, discarded the top two-thirds, carefully sandpapered the newly cut brim, and there, voilà, was a dimple-bottomed green glass tumbler fit for a king. Harry said it needed to be written about. Many people he knew – he might even have said “all of Highgate” – were spending their evenings making tumblers. Why didn’t we show our readers how it was done? Drawing of bottle, dotted line indicating cutting point, that kind of thing. I did nothing, and the glasses were never mentioned again.
Thalidomide, slaughter in Bangladesh, Kim Philby, the Crossman Diaries: these and other bold investigations and campaigns made the reputation of the paper and its editor. But there was another side to Harry, a didacticism of the kind that once inspired children’s encyclopedias, which believed in journalism’s ability to extend the minds and improve the lives of its audience. The most difficult subjects, so the argument went, could be understood if they were written about clearly enough, or edited into clarity. If words alone couldn’t achieve it, then the picture desk and graphic artists would be summoned. How a nuclear submarine works … Six steps to successful jogging. Very little was beneath Harry’s consideration or beyond his curiosity. He was compassionate and egalitarian and inspired great affection. Working for him was my luckiest break.’
Ian Jack
‘Harry lost no time making one of his lightning judgments when I met him in the Cross Street office of the Manchester Evening News in July 1961. I wanted to move from the Northern Echo, where my wife Sheila and I worked. Harry’s career was about to enter a new phase as the Echo’s galvanising editor. “This is silly,” he said without further ado. “I’ll make you the Echo’s news editor.”
I was astonished. I was 24. The paper’s old guard would have had kittens. We went our separate ways, but it was my first lesson in Harry’s belief that obstacles are there to be overturned. His network spanned the world and his advice was eagerly sought. Some 10 years later, out of the blue, he proposed me when Asian friends wanted a managing editor for a paper they were starting in Hong Kong. This time, I did not hesitate. Nor did Harry when I explained that our eldest son would need special care during our stay. “The sun will do him good,” he said. That settled it.
Harry’s unpredictability was legendary. “Is it true that you didn’t go to university?” he asked me on our return, in charge now of The Sunday Times. He would have known if he had read my CV, but it didn’t matter. He appointed me political correspondent sans a degree and we kept in touch until his death.’
Michael Jones
The scene: a news conference in the editor’s office, The Sunday Times, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, fifth floor. Harry Evans, behind his desk, is listening to an intense discussion between the leading lights of his editorial team: Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson, John Barry, Ron Hall. They are debating the significance of the latest piece of evidence about interrogation methods used by the British army in Ulster. The talk is of ethics, risk, newspaper values and responsibility. It might have been taking place in the senior common room of an Oxford college. Evans is beginning to look bored. He is sketching out something on a pad in front of him.
“What’s the story?” he asks.
There is a brief silence, a concealed sigh of exasperation, and then we get down to work. This, after all, is a newspaper, not a tutorial. Evans might have collected some of the brightest journalists of his time, but every now and then he had to cut through the talk and ask what he called the “daft laddie” question that reminded them there were readers out there, real people, whose interest had to be captured.
Evans was a newsman’s journalist, with an eye for a headline and a layout that transformed many a worthy investigation into a front-page story. I remember a rather tortured story about a new regime at the very traditional publication Burke’s Peerage. Evans asked to see the reporter’s notes and spotted a quote. “If you print this story, I’ll strangle you” (or words to that effect.) Evans simply added the words “…said the editor of Burke’s Peerage”, and we had a page lead.
He also had courage, not least in 1979, when our news team was trying to identify the police officers responsible for the death of the demonstrator Blair Peach. We had narrowed it down to one man, but we were short of the document or the admission that most editors would have insisted on. Evans read the story, heard the legal arguments, then laid out a stark front page, with the name and picture of the officer on it. “We’ll run it,” he said. I still remember the shock of that moment, but he was right.
The stories have long faded. But there is nothing ephemeral about the journalistic standards he embraced. His may have been the hot metal era, but its lessons remain as important for the bloggers of today as they were for the reporters of his time.’
Magnus Linklater
‘It was an “editor’s must” in January 1982: to interview train drivers whose union Aslef was threatening a two-day strike. The piece appeared, leading with the (pro-strike) remarks at King’s Cross of an InterCity driver, Harry Barrett. One evening, weeks afterwards, I was – unusually – summoned to Harry’s office, probably about a story on the mounting internal crises at The Times and The Sunday Times themselves. Harry was by now deep into his struggle against Murdoch for the Times’ editorial independence. He was behind his desk, the beam from its Anglepoise lamp the only light in a darkened room. To my surprise, he mentioned my “good report” on the King’s Cross drivers. I didn’t know that his father had been a footplateman for 50 years and had once driven the Royal Train – still less that he had a heart attack the previous year. In early February, Frederick Evans suffered a stroke. He died on March 1. It was 24 hours after Harry returned from the funeral that Murdoch demanded his resignation; and much later that I understood why a two-column story on page two had been important to him.’
Donald Macintyre
‘I recall very pleasant relations - even when I resented some of his requests, including when I was New York correspondent for the newspaper. Harry phoned me, asking me to take over as news editor in London. I said I was uninterested, as I loved working in the US and had just been made vice-president of Times Newspapers of Great Britain in the US. I said I was not keen to engage in local British/European journalism again: “Well, I can always sack you.” I returned to London as news editor. I did not enjoy it. However, a year or so later, dear Harry appointed me foreign features editor, restoring my joy in working for him in a global sense.’
Cal McCrystal
‘Harry’s enthusiasm for righting government wrongs was infectious – even for off-beat stories. On Insight in the early 70s, we proposed what we knew would be a long shot: an investigation of the Turkish government torturing political dissidents in jail. Not exactly a readership booster. Harry agreed, but I wanted my colleague Phil Jacobson to go with me. At an office party at Gray’s Inn Road I collared Harry and made the case.
“Two reporters in Istanbul?” he exclaimed, giving me a sideways look and a knowing smile.
“Yes, Harry, lots of legal stuff.”
“For how long?”
“A week.”
“OK, off you go.”
The story ran with the headline “Torture in Turkey”. When we submitted our expenses with a generous “To Entertainment” item, Harry smiled again.
“Bloody ‘ell, did I pay for that?”
And that, of course, was the other key ingredient of those magical days.
Lord Thomson paid.’
Peter Pringle
‘In 1977, when I was the editor of Honey, a monthly fashion and features magazine for teenage girls, I received a call out of the blue from Harry’s PA Joan Thomas: “Would you like to come and have a cup of tea with the editor of The Sunday Times?” Would I!
It was the summer. He was away, I was going away, so a date five weeks ahead was made. I was staying in a tiny hamlet high on a hill in Liguria when a woman on a bike chugged up with a telegram from Harry: “It would be very helpful for me to know if in principle you would accept an executive job on The Sunday Times. Reply paid.” (It transpired that the editorship of the Look! pages in the review section had been empty for about a year and a union-management ruck was developing). I telegrammed a “yes”.
When I went to Harry’s office, he had copies of Honey in his hand and he pointed out some pages he liked (it possibly did no harm that Tina Brown had been a contributor). I said I had no newspaper experience so I would need help with production. He said there were a couple of his experienced right-hand men who would be helpful. He must have known that wouldn’t happen. He went to a bookshelf where he had copies of his classic five-volume Editing and Design manual. He took down Book Two Handling Newspaper Text, and wrote in the front “To David Robson, good luck, Harold Evans” and that was that.
On my first day at the paper, we happened to come through the front door at the same time. He took the stairs to the sixth floor (of course). When we reached the Look! floor – the fourth – he checked to see if I was out of puff. I wasn’t. “Good, very good,” he said.’
David Robson